Now that I've been noticed, I have started to get a bit of comment spam. Since spam is a hobby of mine I've decided to categorize the top five types of comment spammers
- Sex for Fantasy - These are the guys who live in a fantasy world where everyone who sees their comments are going to click on the link. They use all sorts of entertaining sexual words that are very easy to spot. Their latest trick is to use a normal sentence like this and throw in a couple (or more) words that relate to the topic they're spamming.
- Now you see it, now you don't - These guys are a bit trickier. If you don't spot them from the horrible text they use in their comments, you'll easily spot them by their 404 pages when you follow the links to the page they're promoting. Why would they have a page like that? Well, they're hoping you'll think the page is temporarily down while they actually are cloaking and provide real content to the search engines.
- Bold Spammers - These jokers still go with the old outdated theory that bolding text actually helps. So they'll throw their keyword in the comment and bold it. Nothing much to see here other than a couple of words that are bolded. For those of you who are about to contest that, I've got a site that will be out soon with lots of very fascinating statistically based information on what the search engines like and don't like.
- Foreign Language Spammer - If these guys did not put their keywords in bold at the top of their comments, they would be a bit harder to spot. They'll usually throw their keywords in and then have some random foreign language spam on the page as well. It helps them rank on the foreign language search engine as well as the English version.
- To the Point - Keyword followed by link. Nothing to see here, move along :)
G-Man
I've always loved the early days of robotic word generation comment spammers.
I once got these comments on a blog I ran for a printing company that appeared to be very automatically generated. They would start by using a term on the page say for examples postcards, and then it would just go on from there, something like this.
Postcards, postal, post office, poker, hold em poker, poke her, poker her in the front poke her in the back, Viagra, porn etc etc etc, and then a link.
It may just speak to my personal sense of humor but I kind of miss that spam, it was always landing on the weekend, and made for an amusing Monday morning going thru and deleting them.
Cheers to the last work day of 2006!
Hey Geoff I have my own top 5 comment spammers.... shall i name em ;) LMAO
Sure - hey, when are you going to create a distinctive logo for my blog? :) I wanna have some G-Man tshirts too!
G-Man
G, IM me and ill do you a doodle no problems at all mate
The 2nd kind you mentioned never spamed my blog yet :) or i didn't notice? :P
Thanks for the list! :)
Hey Gman, nice post as always. I guess I could add a couple more types to your list as well but whatever. I believe this is quite representative anyway. You have a nice one for Christmas and the New Year
There are also Joke spammers who leave usually R rated jokes with spammy links below....
Also...guess not with blogs so much, but i moderate a forum and we have a lot of people leave a nonsense post and come back a week or 2 later to insert links after the post is made. HAH, they think they can get past me with that? Riiiiiiggght...
Hi Geoffrey,
Thanks for the Spam Info. Recently found your
blog from the post DouglasKarr.com had today
about your site. I am new to the
blogging world. Started my blog in June 2007. I
luckily have not received much Spam comments.
Question? I was told by a few ProBloggers that
it is O.K. to leave your address after your name.
What are your ideas about that? I am only in
High School. 1st time voter in 2008 Presidential
Election. Yeah!
Elizabeth G.
Ha! Scared to leave my address now!
Hi all,
I cant belive it.. i got caught by one this week and have one to add to the list,. professional spammer
i was lazy and bought 20000 targeted links, pagerank 4-8 from respected blogs and websites. apparently,,
i payed a bit of money for this too i might add, anyway, i started getting my first backlinks on google today, and you guessed it SPAM
this guy had at least 200 URLs all spammed together, not selling a thing, no keywords nothing,, just bam,,, url city,, and poor little old me right in the middle of it, he could have at least put me in pole position..
the first link i got back is pagerank.. 8.. a gov site as well,, (so, if you know what i mean) he choose his targets very very well, the next a 6, there coming in thick and fast now, but thats not the point, he is making a lot of money spamming and pretending to be an honest link broker,
and, just by trying to promote my site, "and get a wizz bang pagerank" i am now right in the middle of sex toy and drug city, and there are some other honest looking urls as well, but i will be getting serps for god knows what.
another thing i saw this week, a pagerank 6 domain for sale on ebay, i did a link check and they all came out of the same forum in china, hundreds of pages of spam, all pointed at that site and others, its like a spam factory, seriously, and the person that just bought the domain is in for a shock. i contacted the buyer seconds after the auction closed of course,, so be careful out there kids,
Love Philski
What? It's really spam? And here I was so touched each morning to see my inbox and blog comments full of what I thought were kind-hearted folks concerned about my penis size and erectile dysfunction.
:) Seriously, I have my blog comments set for approval for anyone who didn't already have an approved comment. I run Akismet, have a captcha on my contact form and would add another line of defense if there's one everyone recommends.
I hate spam: in the can and my inbox.
Ahh, blog comment spams. The spammers way of spreading the love and telling new bloggers exactly what they can expect...
Ahh, spam filters. The bloggers extendo-matic middle finger. How we love thee...
I hear you, brother. Google hasn't figured out how to spider my site yet, but the comment spammers are already hard at work. I love how most of them (on my site, at least) start with some sort of badly worded compliment: "You site is greatest one!", etc.
Gah, same here, except it's our company forums. We have our handful of customers that post things, and read our announcements, but aside from that we just get hammered with spam signups.
The best one we've had ( which actually tricked me too ), was something like "Great site here, anybody else have that problem with the one page?"
He/she didn't spam outright, but employed a 'silent' spamming technique, where they had a spam site set as their URL in the profile, which got a few clicks from members before I figured out what was going on.
LOL - yeah, that's a nice technique. That worked rather well for one time wonders who would drop by forums and do the same thing for a while.
G-Man
Yep,
The your the greatest spam is the most annoying because ones ego is big enough that you stop and look at each one of them as one deletes their comment spam.
That's not bad, actually; everyone has some "problem with the one page" at one time or another. I have to admit that I spent way too much time devising clever traps for the bots before realizing that too many of these spammers are real people.
#2 could also be because of Google tending not to ban non-existent domains / pages. Ever wondered why some get spammed with non-registered domains...
Actually, Stefan, the issue with non-registered domains is because of domain kiting.
This is the process of throwing some links at a domain, registering that domain for less than 6 days and seeing if you get any money from it. Yes, keep it. No, trash it and move on to another...
Can't recall where I read about that but I'm sure someone will come in and provide a link :)
G-Man
I don't know much about domain kiting so I guess that can be the case for some domains. But, I know that the life time of real spammy sites tend to be longer if the comment spamming has been done before registering the domain.
If you get access to the comment spam from a bunch of blogs you'll notice that many of the domains being spammed are like xyz123blabla.info - and they'll end up containing various kind of spammy pages (unless you register them before the spammer... :-P )
More info on domain kiting
This was written last week or so, could provide a little more info on that subject.
I actually read over at BlueHatSEO that some spammers are shotting out millions of spam links to unregistered domains in hopes that the links will stick, and then a few weeks later actually registering the domains after all the hubbub has died down.
So when the site actually launches, it has thousands of links from the get go.
Yep, and it apparently works pretty well. The flipside that I find funny is there are some cases where a SEO was registering the 404ed comment spam domains, so that poor spammer was doing a bunch of work for someone else. LOL.
I am getting heavily hit by spammers, who post something like "Marvelous site! I'll pass it to my friends!". Sadly, some of them bypass the Akismet filter, too. It works for them, because the comment text is alright, but the links and the IPs are not. I guess this is one of the last ways of spamming. Once their IPs are banned, they are out of the game.
I stopped using Akismet. Too many false positives IMO.
G-Man
G-man - Ya got me with #3: Bold Spammers - For those of you who are about to contest that, I've got a site that will be out soon with lots of very fascinating statistically based information on what the search engines like and don't like.. Waiting patiently for that link :)
I've got someone developing the site now. My hope is that it'll be ready by the middle of next month but more than likely it'll be the end of the month :)
Need to send him an e-mail and find out how it's going! :)
G-Man
I keep getting gambling comment spam...go figure...but...I have to admit Akismet has done a great job catching things in my wordpress blog...
I've implemented the Akismet filtering on one of my blogs and it has cut spam down to almost nothing. It's working great so far. But we just started an SEO forum at forum.theorganicseo.com and I have no experience deflecting spam from forums. Has anyone found something similar to Akismet that automates it so I don't have to constantly be checking?
As for my favorite spam, anyone who uses poor English gets entertainment points, but if they quote some well-known novel (which I tend to see more with email spam than blog spam although I have seen it on blog spam) even better. One of my employees is thinking of creating a coffee-table book that is nothing but entertaining spam messages.
Perhaps this goes along with #5, but I get ones with looooong lists of links, all on their own line.